Keith Carter is best known for his mildly surreal and mildly eerie black-and-white photos that create a neo-gothic warm-hearted visual myth of the rural American South, tied together by sensibility rather than narrative. Those images are abundant here, but the highlights of the show are the works from Carter’s recent “Natural Histories” series, in which he has converted from laid-back “bad” bluesman to bitter war denouncer. In large-format sepia prints, Carter has combined in the computer his photos of gutted and blasted American warplanes, taken at an airplane graveyard, with background shots of people disporting themselves in muddy fields in the deep south. The sepia tone, illuminated by glares of light, creates an unsparing vision of devastation, in which the revelers are transformed into despondent survivors in the glowing aftermath of an enveloping nuclear attack. There is no beauty here—maybe some sublimity, but much more the horror of what we manage to do to each other. Welcome to Hell; war is Hell. (Michael Weinstein)
Through May 1 at Catherine Edelman Gallery, 300 W. Superior
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